Parliament Lost: Phineas Finn

Abstract

While Phineas Finn may not be the best of the Palliser novels (indeed, I reserve that distinction for The Duke’s Children), it is undoubtedly one of the three more purely political novels of the six — less melodramatic and contrived than Phineas Redux, more single-mindedly focused on politicians and political processes than The Prime Minister. It may well be the best political novel in English. “There is nothing much like Phineas Finn in English fiction,” one critic has written; it is a political novel “of extraordinary range.” Even Booth, no friend of the Pallisers, called “Phineas Finn” “the best of the Palliser novels [and] still good reading.” Trollope himself, though stating clearly his preference for “Orley Farm” and The Last Chronicle of Barset (always two favorites of his and the public), remarks in the Autobiography that “Phineas Finn? was successful from first to last” (p. 275). He presumably means “successful“ as a novel, and with some of the general public — for the fact is that contemporary reviewers, perhaps regretting that The Last Chronicle of Barset really was the last, found little to like in the book.1 For Trollope, it was sufficient that “the men who would have lived with Phineas Finn read the book, and the women who would have lived with Lady Laura Standish read it also” — for, he says, “As this was what I had intended, I was contented” (Autobiography, p. 273).